Members of the Referendum Council have claimed Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was “deceitful” in privately encouraging them to explore establishing an Indigenous advisory body. In Question Time yesterday, Turnbull said he told the Council in November 2016 that “I thought the prospects of such an amendment to the constitution being successful were absolutely zero”. However, Cape York lawyer Noel Pearson said Turnbull encouraged the Council to “undertake a disingenuous process of pretending to consult with the public” on a proposal he had no intention of approving. In a letter co-signed with opposition leader Bill Shorten and sent in December 2016, Turnbull recommended to the Council that “all models should be equally tested with the community”. Council co-chair Mark Leibler warned against compromise proposals to the constitutionally enshrined Voice to Parliament, saying ($) Indigenous people would “not countenance the substitution of what was a unanimous outpouring at Uluru”.

Queensland Nationals MP Ken O’Dowd has called for deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce to resign, prompting division in the Nationals party room. Fellow Queensland MP David Littleproud has dared Joyce’s critics to “put up or shut up”, while Nationals deputy leader Bridget McKenzie said Joyce “has the full support of the National Party”. Compounding Joyce’s terrible week, the ABC unearthed discrepancies between his official biography and Australian Defence Force records of his service in the Royal Queensland Regiment of the Army Reserve.

Former attorney-general Philip Ruddock’s review of religious freedom laws has been criticised by pro-marriage equality campaigners for intending to hold closed meetings, proceedings of which will be beyond the reach of Freedom of Information requests. In a joint proposal to the review, several churches have proposed limiting anti-discrimination laws to allow church-run institutions greater powers to hire and fire staff based on religious belief, as well as the creation of a “national religious freedom commissioner”. The Equality Campaign, meanwhile, will urge the review to recommend that religious exemptions to anti-discrimination laws be abolished.

In Guatemala, Oxfam International chair Juan Alberto Fuentes Knight has been arrested by authorities, along with former Guatemalan president Alvaro Colom and much of his former cabinet. Knight, Colom’s finance minister, was detained as part of a corruption investigation into the former government’s payment of $35 million to companies running Guatemala City’s bus system. Knight’s arrest is the latest in a series of scandals to rock Oxfam recently, with the charity still reeling from revelations some of its aid workers in Haiti used charity funds to pay sex workers after the 2010 earthquake.

“A decade since it was dredged from the seabed, The World is a forlorn sight. It was the most ambitious plan of Dubai’s pre-crash bubble, topping the creation of peninsulas shaped like palm trees and the construction of the tallest building on the planet, dreamed up as the ultimate trophy project to trump them all. In pursuit of the world’s attention, the oil-rich emirate would remake the world itself.”the guardian

“In a video posted to Twitter in December, which has since gone viral, three young men are seen fawning over the Black Panther poster at a movie theater. One jokingly embraces the poster while another asks, rhetorically: ‘This is what white people get to feel all the time?’ There is laughter before someone says, as though delivering the punch line to the most painful joke ever told: ‘I would love this country, too.’ ” the new york times magazine

“Not everything about Grncarov is phony. There is a real person by that name, and he does play tennis – or at least he did at one time. But before Grncarov played his first and only sanctioned match, he was celebrated for great performances that almost certainly never happened. If Grncarov seems too good to be true, that’s because much of his story isn’t true. The legend of Darko Grncarov is fake news, from the country that helped invent the phenomenon.” slate

“Tony Abbott has told Coalition colleagues the Turnbull government should not blindly follow Labor and create a federal integrity commission – an initiative flagged by Bill Shorten in a scene-setting speech in January ... Shorten in January said Labor would adopt a national integrity commission if he won the next federal election, and invited Turnbull to work in bipartisan fashion between now and the election season.” guardian australia

“The prime minister’s department has not suspended or removed the registration of any lobbyists who have broken rules over the past five years, despite identifying at least 11 instances of breaches. A report published on Wednesday by the auditor general into the lobbyist register, which is managed by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, found it was ‘unclear’ exactly how many alleged instances of noncompliance with the rules had been reported since 2013 because of poor record-keeping.” guardian australia

Mike Seccombe
After two High Court decisions, the fight against federal funding for religious-only school chaplains is set to end with a test case on state anti-discrimination law.You can’t pay someone to break the law, which is what the Victorian government is now doing. And they can’t say, ‘Well, the federal government is paying us to break the law.’

Kate Iselin
The Victorian Liberal Party’s state council has, ahead of this year’s election, endorsed the ‘Nordic model’ to transform sex work laws, but European experiences suggest it can have devastating consequences for workers.

Rebecca Harkins-Cross
She’s a writer whose plays have been widely lauded by critics but largely neglected by the mainstream. Now Patricia Cornelius’s work will take its place on the main stage. “It sounds so hifalutin, but my ambition was really just to be able to create great work … that I felt soared. It never entered my mind that it would happen in the mainstream.”

Annie Smithers
I came across this recipe some years ago and it has become my favourite to move on to once I’m over the ‘sweet’ quince thing. It features Persian overtones, Moroccan influences and rich flavours that are perfect as the nights get colder.

Guy Rundle
The massive expansion of the tertiary sector during the Dawkins era, and the elision of tech institutes and universities, set us off on the wild ride we are still on. Resistance by the humanities was greeted with exemplary punishment – the cheapest courses to teach, they were crowded with tens of thousands of new students and deprived of the funding to cater for them. The problem is worse in Australia than almost anywhere else. Had we a real respect for universities and what they do, the successive depredation of them would have given us a May ’68 redux by now. Instead, the machine hums on.

Paul Bongiorno
The fact is Labor senator Katy Gallagher referred herself to the High Court as a test case for “reasonable steps”. Turnbull’s attack on Shorten for gaming the system is very rich given he argued that Barnaby Joyce was eligible until the court declared otherwise. Joyce remained deputy prime minister and sat in the parliament for 74 days even though he was under a cloud. There is no real substance to the demands that the members now facing the voters again should apologise for the inconvenience and expense the byelections will cost. In all their cases, their good faith is established by their genuine efforts to comply with section 44, according to serious legal advice, which was clearly not the case with the politicians who were bundled out of the parliament last year.

Richard Ackland
This week Gadfly thinks it’s high time to unload some festering snipes and snarls. Take the Australian Press Council as a starting point. The press “regulator” is in the process of rissoling the Indigenous woman Carla McGrath as a public member of the council, on the feeble excuse that her position as deputy chair of GetUp! creates a conflict of interest. What on earth are they on about? The Press Council itself is a conflict of interest, riddled with tired hacks representing their paymasters in the media.

Even the farmers admit it is an increment – the decision by Malcolm Turnbull’s government not to ban live exports over summer, despite evidence of the risk to animals, despite footage of mass deaths and calls from vets to end the trade.The truth is, this is an industry of undue political clout. There are economic arguments against live exports, good ones. There are obvious welfare arguments, too.

Martin McKenzie-Murray
Though the unusual manner in which Aaron Cockman spoke of the alleged murderer of his children and ex-wife – his former father-in-law – was puzzling to many, psychological studies of similar crimes suggest a way to make sense of its seeming contradictions.